Tribes Unite to Fight BP

A delegation of indigenous leaders from Ecuador visited Louisiana to share what they learned in a decades-long battle with Texaco.

Arriving in Louisiana, the delegates prepare to speak of their experiences with their own oil crisis. To view the video documenting the first day of their visit to the Gulf, see the link below, or click here.

A delegation of indigenous and community leaders from Ecuador visited Louisiana this week at the invitation of the United Houma
Nation, a tribe in coastal Lafourche and Terrebone parishes that has
been hit hard by the BP oil catastrophe. The Ecuadorians have come to
share lessons they've learned dealing with another oil disaster: U.S.
oil companies' dumping of toxic waste in the Amazon rainforest.

From 1964 until it pulled out in 1992, Texaco—which merged with
Chevron a decade ago—dumped some 17 million gallons of crude oil and
20 billion gallons of drilling waste water into waterways and pits in
the Ecuadorian Amazon. The contamination has seeped into water
supplies, where it's killed fish and is blamed for health problems
among local residents, who suffer from elevated rates of cancers,
reproductive disorders, and respiratory ailments.

"Although
BP says that it plans to take full responsibility for the damages
caused by its spill and restore the Gulf Coast to the way it was
before, the experience in Ecuador shows that oil companies do the right
thing only when compelled to do so by a combination of political,
financial, media, and community pressure," says the report,
which was prepared by the Asamblea de Afectados por Texaco (Assembly of
Those Affected by Texaco), along with Rainforest Action Network and Amazon Watch.

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Among the members of the visiting delegation is Luis Yanza, a 2008 winner of the prestigious Goldman Prize
for his efforts to help 30,000 people affected by Texaco/Chevron's
contamination file a class-action lawsuit against the oil giant. He
will share his ideas about how Gulf Coast residents can pressure an oil
company to take responsibility for the damage it caused.

The other Ecuadorean delegates are Emergildo Criollo,
a leader of the Cofan tribe who traveled to the U.S. earlier this year
to present Chevron's CEO with 350,000 letters from people around the
world demanding clean-up and compensation for affected communities; Humberto Piaguaje, a representative of the Secoya, one of six indigenous tribes in the rainforest region devastated by oil drilling; and Mariana Jimenez, a grandmother whose home is surrounded by oil contamination and whose husband—a Texaco employee—died of cancer.

Besides
the Houma, whose traditional fishing culture and economy are being
devastated by the oil spill, the delegation has also visited with the Atakapa-Ishak tribe
in Louisiana's Grand Bayou Village. The culture of the Atakapa-Ishak
people is so tied to the water and fishing that their oral history says
they came from the sea.

While it may still be too soon to draw
firm conclusions about the BP oil spill's environmental health effects
on Gulf Coast residents, the spilled oil and contaminants are known to
contain chemicals harmful to human health. Louisiana has reported at least 143 illnesses related to exposure to pollution from the oil spill—108 in cleanup workers and 35 in the population at large.

And
toxic contamination is not the only damage the Houma and Louisiana's
other coastal residents have suffered at the hands of oil companies:
The industry is responsible for as much as half of the severe coastal erosion problem facing Louisiana, which loses a chunk of land as big as a football field to the sea every 15 minutes.

Because
of that accelerating land loss, the bayous of southern Louisiana where
the Houma and other indigenous people have long lived are disappearing,
with high tides now bringing seawater into yards and families forced to
flee north whenever a tropical storm approaches.

The flooding in the region has gotten so severe that the neighboring Biloxi-Chitimacha tribe recently announced they would abandon their ancestral homeland to escape inundation.

But United Houma Nation Chief Michael Dardar says that's not an option for him, even in the wake of BP's disaster.

"People
say just leave," Dardar told a community meeting last week in Dulac.
"Ain't gonna happen, unless you take me out in a box."

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